Related papers: What is "fundamental"?
I contrast two possible attitudes towards a given branch of physics: as inferential (i.e., as concerned with an agent's ability to make predictions given finite information), and as dynamical (i.e., as concerned with the dynamical equations…
Quantum mechanics is more than the derivation of straightforward theorems about vector spaces, Hilbert spaces and functional analysis. In order to be applicable to experiment and technology, those theorems need interpretation and meaning.…
There are two main opposing schools of statistical reasoning, Frequentist and Bayesian approaches. Until recent days, the frequentist or classical approach has dominated the scientific research, but Bayesianism has reappeared with a strong…
Doing research is fighting, what any other thing the human being could do? Fight against powers or to get powers, that depends on us. Science can be a revolution or deadlocked idleness. Still waters, without hitting the stones along their…
We discuss a number of fundamental aspects of modern cosmological concepts, from the phenomenological, observational, theoretical and epistemic points of view. We argue that the modern cosmology, despite a great advent, in particular in the…
On one popular view, the general covariance of gravity implies that change is relational in a strong sense, such that all it is for a physical degree of freedom to change is for it to vary with regard to a second physical degree of freedom.…
Advances in science are being sought in newly available opportunities to collect massive quantities of data about complex systems. While key advances are being made in detailed mapping of systems, how to relate this data to solving many of…
We offer a view of mathematics as an experimental science where axioms play the role of foundational theories like general relativity and quantum mechanics in physics. Under this view, axioms are provisional and inferred from experience…
The most successful "Standard Model" allows one to define the so-called "Elementary Particles". Now from another point of view, philosophical, how can we think of them? Which kind of a status can be attributed to Elementary Particles and…
We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…
Analogies between quantum mechanics and sociology lead to the hypothesis that quantum objects are complex products of evolution. Like biological objects they are able to receive, to work on, and to spread semantic information. In general…
The evolution of theoretical physics in the XX century differs significantly from that in XVII-XIX centuries. While continuous progress is observed for theoretical physics in XVII-XIX centuries, modern physics contains many questions that…
With a view to the results discussed in the first two parts of this paper, the concept of time is revisited oncemore and chosen as an example in order to demonstrate the meaning of fundamental in both physical and philosophical terms. It is…
Physical laws are a set of rules in the relationship between observations made by the experimenter. All these observations are made through a mechanism that links the external world to the experimenter's awareness, a mechanism which is not…
From the Physics point of view, time is now best described through General Relativity, as part of space-time which is a dynamical object encoding gravity. Time possesses also some intrinsic irreversibility due to thermodynamics, quantum…
Revolutionary advances in both theory and technology have launched cosmology into its most exciting period of discovery yet. Unanticipated components of the universe have been identified, promising ideas for understanding the basic features…
In this paper, we reject commonly accepted views on fundamentality in science, either based on bottom-up construction or top-down reduction to isolate the alleged fundamental entities. We do not introduce any new scientific methodology, but…
In this letter, we provide new insight into Willems et al.'s fundamental lemma by studying the concept of universal inputs. An input is called universal if, when applied to any controllable system, it leads to input-output data that…
We investigate the reasons of having confidence in mathematical theorems. The formalist point of view maintains that formal derivations underlying proofs, although usually not carried out in practice, contribute to this confidence. Opposing…
Quantum "states" are objective probability measures. Because their dependence on a time is not the time dependence of an evolving state, they are neither states of Nature nor "states of knowledge." There is no such thing as an evolving…